awesome-terminal 🌈

This is a quick guide to set up an awesome terminal that will change your life (or not but it's definitely worth the try). After completing the following your terminal will have:

• Awsome theme (colors) & more syntax coloring with minimalist style
• Icons
• Live git status in the command line (status, branch...)
• Auto-suggestion while typing commands
• Cool aliases like .. instead of cd ..
• Infinite customizations possibilities!
• ...

Please note that this guide is strongly opinionated, as it is my setup, but you can still customize it a lot afterward don't worry.

For windows, I recommend using wsl2 + windows terminal (download it in the Microsoft store).

For macOs, I recommend using Iterm2, coping the app in two versions, one for arm64 and one with rosetta. you can then add different commands depending on the architecture in your .zshrc like here with pnpm for arm64 and nvm for rosetta (feel free to put anythig in the if statement, this is just an example):

if [ $(arch) = "arm64" ]
then
  export PNPM_HOME="/Users/nohehf/Library/pnpm"
  export PATH="$PNPM_HOME:$PATH"
else
  export NVM_DIR="$HOME/.nvm"
  [ -s "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh" ] && \. "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh"  # This loads nvm
  [ -s "$NVM_DIR/bash_completion" ] && \. "$NVM_DIR/bash_completion"  # This loads nvm bash_completion
fi

Customizing your terminal emulator

First, you can set up your preferred terminal theme & font:
If you wanna use windows terminal here is my settings.json config file TODO

Theme

For the theme, I like to use Atom one dark, but feel free to use any other one.

{
    "name": "Atom One Dark",
    "background": "#282C34",
    "foreground": "#CCCCCC",
    "black": "#000000",
    "blue": "#61AFEF",
    "brightBlack": "#5C6370",
    "brightBlue": "#61AFEF",
    "brightCyan": "#56B6C2",
    "brightGreen": "#98C379",
    "brightPurple": "#C678DD",
    "brightRed": "#E06C75",
    "brightWhite": "#FFFFFF",
    "brightYellow": "#D19A66",
    "cyan": "#56B6C2",
    "green": "#98C379",
    "purple": "#C678DD",
    "red": "#E06C75",
    "white": "#ABB2BF",
    "yellow": "#D19A66"
}

Fonts

For fonts, if you want the full compatibility with powerlevel10k (to support all icons) you need to use any font from nerd fonts. I like to use JetBrainsMono click to download I then install "JetBrainsMono Nerd Font Mono" and set it as the default terminal font.

Installs

Zsh

To follow you either need to have or install zsh and git. To check if they are already installed run: zsh and git If they are not installed run the following to install them:

sudo apt update 
sudo apt install git zsh -y

ohmyzsh

Run the following to install ohmyzsh:

sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/master/tools/install.sh)"

note: if you have any issue installing it please refer to ohmyzsh official website

powerlevel10k

First refresh zsh with exec zsh Then run the following commands to install powerlevel10k:

git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/romkatv/powerlevel10k.git ~/powerlevel10k
echo 'source ~/powerlevel10k/powerlevel10k.zsh-theme' >>~/.zshrc

note: if you have any issue installing it please refer to powerlevel10k official repo

Auto-suggestions & syntax highlighting:

note: for macOs I strongly reccomand using fig instead of zsh-autosuggestions : see Fig.

Run the following command to install zsh-autosuggestions:

git clone https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions ${ZSH_CUSTOM:-~/.oh-my-zsh/custom}/plugins/zsh-autosuggestions

Run the following command to install zsh-syntax-highlighting:

git clone https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting.git ${ZSH_CUSTOM:-~/.oh-my-zsh/custom}/plugins/zsh-syntax-highlighting

.zshrc

Now that you have zsh replacing bash your .bashrc is replaced by .zshrc You have to change a few things in it to make it work. Open .zshrc in your favorite text editor and :

1. Find the line with plugins= in your .zshrc and add this (or just take mine later):

plugins=(git zsh-autosuggestions zsh-syntax-highlighting)

2. (optionnal) Change time-stamps (if you are european like me you probably use dd/mm/yyyy format) by adding:

HIST_STAMPS="dd/mm/yyyy"

3. (optional) Activate completion waiting dots, add the following:

COMPLETION_WAITING_DOTS="true”

Some very optionated advise:

Github cli

To manage your GitHub repos I recommend using the gh cli, it allows you to easily create repos, links your account with git... you can install it and authenticate to your account with the following commands:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-key C99B11DEB97541F0
sudo apt-add-repository https://cli.github.com/packages
sudo apt update
sudo apt install gh
gh auth login

*for more info see https://cli.github.com/.

Nodejs & pnpm

If you use nodejs I strongly recommend using pnpm both as a packet manager (instead of yarn or npm) and a node version manager. It is super fast for package managing, good for global installs, and the version manager allows you to switch node versions without the pain. It's also fully compatible with npm so no worries if your co-workers don't use it (yet) To install it and enable node lts as default run the following commands:

curl -fsSL https://get.pnpm.io/install.sh] | sh -
sudo pnpm env use --global lts

Then refer to the pnpm docs to use it (but it's most likely like npm).

Endnote:

Thank you for taking the time of reading through this, hope you will enjoy your brand new terminal! 🌈 Please consider leaving feedback as an issue, and feel free to contribute. Last I will thank @garrytrinder that inspired me to write this with his setup see article ⭐.